Interview: Yassmin Abdel-Magied
Six thoughts from an interview with Yassmin Abdel-Magied: thinker, activist, and author of Talking About a Revolution, a collection of incisive essays exploring resistance, justice – and her abiding love of cars.
On reliving past trauma: “I’ve described this book as a kind of coda to my 20s: a quite complicated, tumultuous time! I didn’t want to spend too much time in the new essays readdressing everything that happened when I left Australia. But the process of going back to the older pieces I’d written round about the time I left… I felt a lot of sadness for this past version of myself, and empathy for who I was at the time and what I was going through. I think it was important for me to include [these pieces].”
On tapping out: “We have to allow ourselves the time and space away from things to be able to come back. Sometimes, we see doing this work, whether it’s activism or writing or advocacy or changemaking in any form, as a 24/7 full-time thing, and stepping away for even a moment as somehow taking away from our commitment – but that’s not how we operate as humans. I would not have been able to function if I didn’t stop – I couldn’t have written this book five years ago… I think this applies to everyone regardless of the scale of what has been experienced. We must give ourselves the grace of allowing ourselves the space to heal and to process, and to just breathe.”
On reclaiming the self: “There is a clarifying aspect to experiences such as [those I went through]. This collection allows me to say who I am at this point in time, how I think, what I think about – and it’s very much on my own terms. It is very important to me to do things on my own terms: if something is not on the terms that I want or accept, I just won’t do it, because other people’s terms have not served me well. I can be slightly obstinate, it’s not the easiest thing to deal with at times, but I also think it’s part protection mechanism, and part reclaiming some power. There is great power in setting the terms, and so I want to have agency through that.”
On rejecting expectations: “Much of my life has been, consciously or unconsciously, resisting the ideas that everyone, from family to the world at large, has of someone like me. I find great delight in not being anything that people expect. People quite often think that I’m a very serious person, because I talk about serious issues, and I take life seriously. But anyone who knows me personally knows that one of my favourite things to do is to laugh. Even though that’s a small thing, I think that in a quiet way – or maybe a not-so-quiet way – it’s a reflection of the fact that I’m just not interested in being who other people think I should be. I find it so boring – and ultimately, who does it serve?”
On her appetite for adventure: “My father is a deeply curious man. He’s been retired for years now and has decided he wants to learn Urdu and Russian, because he wants to keep his brain going. He was always teaching us how things worked and encouraging us to understand the world around us, and to be curious. Also, we were only the second Sudanese family in Brisbane, and the next one didn’t come until ten years later, so there was nobody and nowhere I could go that was the same as me. So, I HAD to be curious. Books also played a big role. I loved reading; it opened the world for me. I imagined myself as every one of those characters: George from Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, Allana from Tamora Pierce’s books… I guess I wanted to live those adventures in my actual life, too, I didn’t want them to just be limited to the pages of my books.”
On being afraid: “Feel the fear and do it anyway. I don’t think fear is a stopping emotion… I think it is a way our bodies try to protect us, and sometimes it is worth listening to that, but quite often we can talk to that and say, hey, you know, I know that I’m feeling quite scared about this, but what’s the worst that can happen? And, what’s the best that can happen? You just don’t know until you try. Putting out this book and sharing all the quite personal and vulnerable things that I’ve been thinking about the last couple of years is terrifying! I don’t even know if anybody’s going to read it! But if I don’t do anything, then what’s the point of living? This is what our life is for: to try, and then to see what happens.”
Talking About a Revolution by Yassmin Abdel-Magied is published by Penguin Random House, RRP $34.99. Image: Photo Elliot Lauren/ Penguin Random House.
I originally interviewed Yassmin Abdel-Magied in May 2022, for Mindful Puzzles magazine. The interview was not published.
